SILTV.COM – The automated teller machine (ATM) is a cornerstone of modern self-service banking. While it is easy to assume a single person invented the device, its history is a multi-decade story of incremental progress. Engineers, conceptual thinkers, and business leaders across different eras and countries each solved specific pieces of the puzzle—ranging from early mechanical dispensers and radioactive checks to the magnetic stripe cards and networked total tellers we use today.
The Early Vision: Luther Simjian’s “Hole in the Wall”
The earliest groundwork for automated banking was laid by Luther Simjian. Born in Turkey in 1905, Simjian was a prolific inventor with a background in medicine and photography, holding patents for flight speed indicators, self-focusing portrait cameras, and color X-ray devices.
In 1939, while living in New York, Simjian conceptualized a “hole-in-the-wall machine” designed to let customers execute financial transactions without a human teller. He filed 20 patents and persuaded Citicorp (then the City Bank of New York) to run a six-month field trial. The experiment failed commercially—the bank noted that the machine was primarily used by a small group of individuals who preferred avoiding human tellers—leading Citicorp to remove it. Nevertheless, Simjian established the core concept of automated banking decades ahead of its time.
Crossing the Atlantic: John Shepherd-Barron and Barclays
By the late 1960s, changing consumer schedules created demand for access to cash outside standard banking hours. John Shepherd-Barron, managing director at De La Rue Instruments, spearheaded the development of the De La Rue Automatic Cash System (DACS).
On June 27, 1967, Barclays Bank installed Shepherd-Barron’s machine at its branch in Enfield, North London. British comedy actor Reg Varney was the first customer to use it. Because plastic cards with data storage did not exist yet, the DACS accepted specialized checks impregnated with carbon-14, a mild radioactive isotope. The machine read the carbon-14 footprint and verified it against a Personal Identification Number (PIN). Shepherd-Barron originally intended to use a six-digit PIN, but shortened it to four digits after his wife, Caroline, noted that six digits were difficult to remember consistently.
Rather than patenting the DACS, Shepherd-Barron and Barclays kept the system as a trade secret. They feared that public patent disclosures would expose the internal coding mechanics to potential fraud.
